How Can I Get Startup Funding Without Giving Away Half the Company?
By Tim Berry
I’m surprised how often I get asked the question in the title, or variations of it, from people in startups. And you will hear discussions in which experts recommend ways to get investors who take less equity and demand less control. That seems short-sighted or worse. I posted here years ago dumb investors is a... Read More »
My Fish Bowl Story of Marketing Mistakes
By Tim Berry
Here’s a mistake I made that taught me a lot and helped me teach others. The Mistake Many years ago, I took a new product – early business planning software – to its first trade show. We did the standard booth thing, brought along products, and sell sheets, business cards, and so forth. And we put... Read More »
Experts, Experts Everywhere, and Not a Pause to Think
By Tim Berry
My title for this post is taken (slightly modified, but better known as shown here than in the original) from Coleridge’s The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” I’m worried that one downside of our amazingly connected world, in relation to small business and entrepreneurship, is that business experts are everywhere,... Read More »
State Supreme Court Decides in Favor of Nasty Reviews
By Tim Berry
The Oregon Supreme Court just reaffirmed the legal protection of nasty reviews as free speech. Which reminds me of the ongoing opportunity and problem of reviews. Amazon.com reviews, Yelp reviews, Google, TripAdvisor, and all of them are a combination of powerful, important, and yet also full of problems. Users care and we generally love the... Read More »
My Dumb MBA Mistake
By Tim Berry
I’ve made a lot of mistakes. You can’t build a business from scratch without making mistakes. It’s an entire category on this blog, more than 150 posts. This dumb MBA mistake wasn’t my worst, but it’s one of the easiest to explain afterwards, and I hope one that might help others avoid making it too. There... Read More »
Demystify Business Failure Statistics
By Tim Berry
My Friday video for this week is one I did a while back, the truth about all those well-publicized business failure statistics. Most of the clichés we read everywhere are just often-repeated guesses. Nobody really knows. Read More »
Displacement Principle in Startups and Small Business
By Tim Berry
It’s really pretty simple. Intuitive. I didn’t learn about it in business school; I learned about it while building and running a real business. I decided to call it the displacement principle. Displacement Principle: In the real world of small business, everything you do rules out something else you can’t do. My favorite metaphor is... Read More »
Short Story on The Importance of Defining Blame
By Tim Berry
(Note: I happened on this story here on Quora, as an answer by Prashant Sharma. I decided to share it here because I like it. ) A bus full of passengers was on its journey. Suddenly the weather changed and there was a huge downpour and lightning all around. The passengers saw that lightning appeared to strike their... Read More »
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